Featured plant:
Autumn Blaze maple

If you want a large, fast-growing tree with spectacular fall color, Autumn Blaze maple is an excellent choice. This award-winning tree is so special that we’ve chosen it as our featured plant for fall for two years in a row.

This dependable selection of Acer x freemanii is a hybrid of the red and silver maple that combines the best features of both. It is more tolerant of stressful environmental conditions than red maple and has much better form and fall color than silver maple.

Autumn Blaze is adaptable to a wide range of climate and soil conditions. It tolerates clay soil, and will withstand wet soil conditions and drought. Consider it for a site that isn’t right for red or sugar maple, or as a more colorful alternative in place of silver or Norway maples.

The growth rate of this cultivar is about four times faster than that of a red maple. Under optimal conditions it can grow 3 feet or more per year. Eventually it will grow to 50 feet tall and 40 feet wide.

Summer foliage is medium green. In the fall Autumn Blaze consistently develops brilliant, long-lasting orange-red color. This deciduous tree develops a dense oval head with strong branching, which makes it a popular shade tree as well as an ornamental tree.

For all these reasons, Autumn Blaze maple was selected as the 1997 Tree of the Year by the Iowa Nursery and Landscape Association, the Urban Tree of the Year for 2003 by the arborist magazine City Trees, and was chosen the 2004 Urban Tree of the Year by the Society of Municipal Arborists.

Today Autumn Blaze is one of the most popular hybrid maples in the United States and also sells well in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and France. Stop by Lavalette Nursery and Garden Center soon to select one for yourself.